I've known since elementary school that I was different (and not just for my voraphilia), though I never knew how exactly I was different. It was never really a problem either; I was considered weird, but apart from the resulting bullying I could live with that. I never really cared much about other people's opinion of me anyway.

Last year however, after ever increasing personal problems (mostly at work, but also in my private life), I finally saw no other solution than to visit an expert and find out just what the hell made me so different that I could barely understand other people. Or myself, for that matter.

Long story short, it turns out that I have Asperger syndrome. Well, I guess that...
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Well, those who have been watching my gallery may have noticed that lately I've been adding several carnivorous plant pictures drawn by Sharue.

Carnivorous plants have always been a favorite of mine, because they are so unusual as predators go, and a lot of variation is possible. I love seeing them in games as well. The various Deku Baba in recent Zelda games, and of course the classic Piranha Plants from the Mario games will always have a special place in my heart. (They are in Angelissa's garden, to be specific... :D )

A few days ago, I got my very own carnivorous plant in real life, and it is doing quite well. With a little help from me, it has caught two beetles so far. It's really neat to see the trap snap shut on the insect, then slowly seal up...
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So, thinking it would be convenient to be able to log in to my home network when I am elsewhere (such as at work), I set up an ssh daemon on one of my systems and shoot the appropriate holes into my firewall.

Almost instantly, I find several chinese, taiwanese, vietnamese and korean IPs hammering away at my ssh server, trying to force themselves in. One even tried a complete dictionary from a to z as user names. -sigh-

Of course they didn't get in. Hey, I'm a professional BOFH, you didn't think I'd be letting the unwashed horde from the east run rampant on my personal servers, did you?

Oh well, guess I'll just have to launch a few nuclear LARTs and route certain IP ranges to blackhole hell...

Well, normally travelling by train or underground is quite relaxing... I just sit down, pop out my laptop and do some work or play a few games for an hour, then get off and start my day at work.

Unfortunately, sometimes the public transport attracts some of the more shady and antisocial characters. I hate to sit in the back 'cause that's where the weirdos are. You know, the obnoxious types, smoking when it's forbidden, making loud music, damaging the property and generally creating a nuisance.

If someone actually steps up and says something about their antisocial behaviour, they are usually met with scorn and threats, while the rest of the public stares apathically. A few times, I've even seen it escalate and get nasty.

A few times I have even...
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-sigh-

Email used to be such a nice communication channel, but nowadays it seems it is only used for spam, spam and more spam. Most of the email I get these days are ads for viagra, mortgages, porn and other items of dubious nature and questionable value... And that's even after my mailserver rejected the most obvious spam...

I call for an open season on spammers! If every human-eating predator out there would devour at least one spammer a day, the spam problem would be solved in no time!

Sometimes it takes a long time for ideas for drawings to actually make it from my head onto paper. I've had unused ideas sitting on scribbled notes, rushed concept drawings or even just in the back of my head for months, sometimes even years...

One of the most persistent so far is my idea for drawing Angelissa in her naga form, with my favorite videogame heroines Chun Li, Lara Croft and Nina (from Breath of Fire) in her belly. But whenever I try to put it on paper, it just doesn't work. I usually end up drawing something else, or nothing at all...

-sigh-

Maybe it's because I'm still my own worst critic. I simply don't believe I'm good enough to pull it off...

Well, it looks that way. Since sometime yesterday, I and other customers of XS4All have been unable to reach any AOL servers. So I have been unable to use AIM. :cry:

Sometimes you don't know what you have until you miss it... Many times have I cursed "AOHell" for unleashing the lusers onto the Internet (Google for "eternal september" if you don't know what I mean), but the loss of AIM means the loss of a wonderful place to meet and chat with people - especially for a techy with few real-life friends like myself. :?

Oh well, I'll just spend time coloring pictures and upgrading some of my older systems with some parts I salvaged from decommissioned company systems headed for the shredder... Hopefully the network gurus will find the problem soon...

So this morning a request arrives in our queue to create a new filesystem on one of our servers for a client application. My collegue immediately contacts the security guys for the root password. ("root" is the admin user on *nix systems, you Windoze luzers... :P )

You see for some reason our management has decided that system administrators should not have administrator rights. We have to request them each and every time.

Security guy #1 replies "We don't have it."
Security guy #2 replies, "I don't think we have it, but I'll ask my collegues."
Security guy #3 replies, "Nope, we don't have it."

So a bit at a loss what to do next (there is a client waiting after all), my collegue turns to me. I am a bit of a hacker, in that I know...
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Open source is wonderful, really. Except when it decides to misbehave, that is... Such is the case on my new Sun Blade 100.

For those who don't know yet, one of my hobbies is fiddling around with old or obscure hardware. Anyone who isn't completely braindead, terminally clueless or a total luser can get a standard PC up and running, but trying the same with an old, beaten Sun box with obscure hardware with missing or incomplete drivers is something different...

Anyway, so I have this nice little Blade 100, one of Sun's desktop models, and I thought it would be neat to use it as a printer server, among other things. So I hook up my trusty Epson printer to it, and it sees the thing well enough. I'm even able to read its status and send it some basic commands,...
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